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A Different Way to Use Photoshop Brushes

I hope everyone is having a great Spring and most of us are about to start our Summer vacations! My kids are almost out of school, which is a blessing and a disaster in the making lol. These two boys are loud and crazy, and I’m going to have to handle it all day long lol! But, we have beach vacation coming up in early August! Can’t wait!

Anyway, I digress lol. I have two little lovely brushes for you today. Both of them are second sets. One is a set of hand drawn flower brushes and the other is a set of vintage flower brushes. I love these brushes and use all four sets constantly in my work. I use them as stamps on papers and elements. I also turn them into elements themselves.

I also want to note that I am now offering two different prices for all my CU products! You can now purchase two different licenses: one for PU or one for CU. So, if you plan to use my CU products for personal use only, you can buy them for a PU price! If you plan to use them in your work for commercial use, you can now buy them for just a few dollars more! These two products are available at both of my stores:

Below are previews of my latest additions and under that I decided to create a tutorial on how to turn a flower brush into an element using PSE! I hope you enjoy it!

Tutorial: How to create an element out of a stamp

Open which ever version of PSE you are using, click ‘file’, ‘new’, then ‘blank file’. Or, you can use the shortcut “ctrl+N”.

It will open up a window so you can select size, etc. You want to make sure you have it open to 12×12 inches (or 30.48 cm), 300 for the resolution and “transparent” for background content.

Next, in your brushes file, find the brush you wish to turn into an element. I chose one of my hand drawn flowers.

Then stamp it onto your blank canvas.

Next, I zoomed in to about 50% just to work a bit closer with the element.

Next, you want to create a new layer. Go to and click ‘layers’, ‘new’, and then ‘layer’. Or you can use the shortcut “Shift+ctrl+N”. You want to make sure the second layer is underneath the element (Layer 1). Just simply drag Layer 2 underneath Layer 1. You can rename the new layer if you wish, but I did not for this tutorial as I am only using a couple of layers.

Now I am going to want to “fill” in the element with brushes and color. I chose the color I want to fill in the element with and select the brush I wish to use to “paint” the element. Make sure you select “layer 2” by clicking on it. You don’t want to paint over your stamp. You want to paint underneath it. Here I have selected a watercolor brush of mine. It’s semi-opaque, so I stamp several times.

Now I want to create a new layer because I want to “fill in” the transparent spots with a different color. So, again, go to ‘layers’, click ‘new’ and ‘layer’ or, “Shift+ctrl+N”. This will be called Layer 3. Move layer three all the way to the bottom and make sure it’s selected.

Next choose your color you wish to fill in those transparent spots. I chose a dark blue here and using the same watercolor brush, I stamped all over until all the transparent spots are gone. This gives a lovely watercolor effect with different variations of color.

What you do now, is merge Layer 2 with Layer 3. Simply click on Layer 2 and use the shortcut “ctrl+E”. Or, you can go to ‘layers’ and towards the bottom of the drop down menu, click ‘merge down’. Remember to have Layer 2 selected.

For added fun, I decided to make it more “painted” by adding a watercolor splatter on it. I clicked on Layer 2, selected my color I wish to use (here I chose a very light blue), selected by spatter brush I wish to use and stamped over the watercolor.

Cool, right?! I am going for a hand drawn/hand painted look here. Now you can tell it’s a mess. It’s all outside the lines! Yep. But, that’s easily taken care of. You are going to select Layer 2 with your mouse. Now you are going to “extract” or cut out the outer area. I selected my polygonal lasso tool (see my tutorial on how to extract using the polygonal lasso tool). Then, while on Layer 2, NOT layer 1 or else you will remove the flower stamp, work the line of the flower, removing the watercolor as you go.

That’s it! Just keep removing the watercolor all around the element, keeping within the lines of the flower until you are finished. Then you are going to want to merge the two layers. You can do that by going to ‘layers’, ‘merge visible’. Or, you can use the shortcut again “ctrl+E”. Then you are going to want to save your element as a .png file to retain the background transparency. Now you have a beautiful “hand drawn/hand painted” flower!

Thank you for checking out my little tutorial and hope you found it useful!

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